Bernard Hogan-Howe is an old-fashioned policeman who believes that officers
should police the streets. He was a successful chief constable in Liverpool
– but can he impose himself on the Met?

It is easy to see why Bernard Hogan-Howe appealed to Conservative politicians looking for a new Metropolitan Police commissioner. As chief constable of Merseyside, he built up an impressive reputation for getting to grips with the city’s gangs and for tackling anti-social behaviour. He has been publicly scornful of the last Labour government’s top-down approach to policing through Whitehall crime targets.

Hogan-Howe is a scourge of liberal judges and soft sentencing. He is dismissive of the health and safety brigade and has been an outspoken champion of the victims of crime. He doesn’t so much advocate zero tolerance as “total policing”. He believes in stopping crime and in keeping order. If you wanted a Scotland Yard chief who looks tough and talks tough (and isn’t Bill Bratton, the American favoured by David Cameron), then Hogan-Howe fits the bill perfectly.

The new commissioner was in the running for the job when Sir Ian Blair departed after falling out with Boris Johnson, the London mayor, two years ago. But he was pipped to the post by another straight-talking copper, Sir Paul Stephenson, who recently fell victim to the feeding frenzy surrounding the News of the World phone hacking scandal.

And therein lies Hogan-Howe’s greatest problem: never has a commissioner taken over at the Met after the forced resignation of two predecessors. The question that the new chief needs to answer is whether it is any longer possible to do the job effectively. Has it become too unwieldy, too political and too exposed a post for anyone to succeed in giving the system the shake-up it needs?

Yet, while it may sound perverse given the mayhem of the summer, Hogan-Howe arguably arrives at a propitious moment for an old-fashioned policeman who wants to get back to some basic principles. The riots in London and other English cities triggered a palpable change in the public mood.

No longer are people prepared to stand for their police acting like a branch of the social services. They watched on television as yobs from across London, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool looted, burned and robbed, while the police – to begin with, at least – looked on as well.

Not only was that a PR disaster, especially in London; it also fed a growing popular perception that the boys in blue have simply lost the plot. The middle classes, who would once have supported the police without reservation, have become increasingly critical of their priorities.

Whether accurate or not, the police have succeeded in giving the impression that they prefer soft targets and an easy life. The story last week of two police officers playing cricket on a village green who arrested a woman after she complained about balls landing in her garden seemed to describe this gap between what the public wants to see and what the police want to do.

The good news for Londoners – and, by extension, the rest of the country – is that Hogan-Howe shares a lot of these concerns. He told MPs on the home affairs select committee last year: “If you are asking me the core mission [for the police], for me it has not changed much from Sir Robert Peel, which is that the idea is to stop crime happening. If it happens, you sort it out or help the victims as best you can, and the maintenance of order allows other things to flourish…. It seems to me that no one else will do it if the police don’t.”

That sounds like a clear statement of what most of us expect from the police; and yet it is an approach from which the force has stepped away over the past 30 years or more. It was only relatively recently that senior officers accepted that the gradual removal of uniformed bobbies from the streets was allowing criminals to take over and harming public confidence. While the police clearly have more functions to perform than in days gone by, it remains the case that the people they serve want to see them on the streets, not merely to reassure but to enforce order and prevent crime.

Hogan-Howe is very much of that school of thought. Born in Sheffield, the son of a single mother, he joined South Yorkshire Police in 1979 and at 28 went to Oxford to study law. But he seems to have avoided embracing some of the more progressive ideas that others of his generation bought into.

Unlike many of his high-ranking colleagues, he has even voiced his support for the Government’s new elected Police and Crime Commissioners, or at least for the principle of greater accountability that lies behind them.

In London, he will be able to discover whether the system works, since he will be directly accountable to an elected politician, the Mayor, as well as to Parliament through the Home Secretary, his other political master. He will find that the system works very well if the public feels that he is delivering the sort of policing it wants.

One of his innovations on Merseyside was to tackle anti-social behaviour by focusing on persistent trouble-makers and crime “hot spots”. He formed a squad that targeted the top 10 worst areas and then worked on the next 10, and so on down the list. The aim was to enforce the law in areas where the criminals held sway; most of the victims of crime are found in these areas and they are repeatedly targeted.

In Liverpool city centre, at strategic points such as clubs, pubs and bus stations, he set up 15 scanners, of the sort used at airports, to check for knives. Another approach Hogan-Howe adopted was for his officers to visit every victim of crime. While this uses a lot of police time, it also gets officers out among the communities they serve, meeting people, picking up intelligence and generally reassuring the public that they are on their side.

“It’s wrong for the police service to be arrogant and say we don’t attend a certain kind of incident,” he told this newspaper in an interview. “I think what’s intolerable is if we don’t appear to care to listen, to do our best to help them through a difficult time and to take reasonable steps to catch the offender and stop it happening again. We should do the right thing for the reasonable taxpayer.”

But it is often hard to get things done. Sir Paul Stephenson, whose departure had nothing to do with his lack of success as a police chief, none the less saw the seeds of the summer riots sown on his watch and battled to change an ingrained culture among officers.

Sir Paul wanted to restore common sense to policing and was keen to stop beat bobbies walking in pairs – a move that would double visibility at a stroke and encourage officers to talk to the public rather than to each other. But he was not noticeably successful in getting his way: police representatives continue to defend the practice on grounds of safety.

The police have become distant, both physically and culturally, from the people they are supposed to serve. More police on the beat has been a constant refrain of the public. But with budget cuts and other demands on his dwindling resources, can Hogan-Howe deliver? He managed it on Merseyside, where falling crime rates were matched by public satisfaction levels far higher than elsewhere in the country. If he doesn’t do the same in London then the gradual decline in public confidence will be hard to check.

While Hogan-Howe is the police chief for London, he has responsibilities that carry wider national implications, not least for counter-terrorism in the run-up to the Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee next year.

With London always the destination of choice for marchers and protesters, he is inevitably in the public eye, not least because many politicians and commentators either live or work in the capital and have first-hand knowledge of its problems, and a ready opinion about how to deal with them. London is also Britain’s shop window for the rest of the world, attracting millions of tourists every year whose view of the country will be determined by their experiences there.

As the country’s most prominent police officer, he can set a tone that will resonate throughout the system.

Unlike his predecessor but one, Sir Ian Blair, he is unlikely to prioritise a change in the Met’s logo to make it more inclusive – or at least Londoners hope he won’t. If they wanted the name changed at all, it would be from a service back to a force.